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Open Channels: Offers from North and South Korea

While South Korea is generally switching to digital television, the South Korean government has reportedly agreed to maintain a system for the broadcasting of analogue TV signals,to enable people in North Korea to watch analogue South Korean television. North Koreans along the west coast of Hwanghae Province and the east coast of Gangwon Province are apparently the most likely (secret) audience of these television programs. The programs are also said to be within reach of an unspecified number of tv watchers in China’s northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning.

North Korea apparently never jammed these television broadcasts, as they just happened to spread across the border like radio waves do between every country. On the other hand, North Korea aggressively jams the South Korean government’s radio stationsspecifically targeted at the North, North Korea Tech wrote on Sunday. The South keeping up analog signals for a North Korean television audience while using digital signals for the audience at home might therefore be judged in Pyongyang as propaganda of the same category as the stations it already jams.

In another development, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in a televised speech on Tuesday, called for an end to the “confrontation” with South Korea. According to Voice of Russia, Kim Jong-un suggested the end to confrontation in a new year address, the first time in the past 19 years that a North Korean leader has offered New-Year wishes to the compatriots.